What are role addresses?

Role addresses are the administrative email accounts that all companies use to collect incoming emails that should be handled by a group or department. Typical examples are help@, mailer-daemon@, admin@, etc.

Why should we not send to role addresses?

There are two main reasons not to send marketing content to role addresses.

It’s a waste of time – These email accounts were built for efficiency and functionality, not one-to-one communications. Since they are often maintained by a group, not an individual, your content has a very low chance of being relevant to the person who opens the email, and your conversion rate will reflect that.

It’s a risk – Since your content is not what the recipient will expect to see in that inbox, you run a high risk of the email being instantly deleted or marked as spam. And since you are not sending to a known individual, it is impossible to prove that the person opening the email has given their consent for you to send it, raising the likelihood of a complaint.

Furthermore, these addresses are often publicly available on websites, meaning they are easily picked up by spammers. Email providers know this and monitor emails sent to role accounts, often using them as spam traps.

What can I do to avoid this?

Luckily, Emarsys takes care of most of this for you. The most common role addresses are included in our Global Backlist and can never receive any messages from you (for exceptions, see below).

You can also create a segment using the contact criterion Email begins with to filter out contacts with other role addresses:

You can then either attempt to find personal addresses for them,excludethem from your email campaigns or clean your database by deleting them.

Are there any exceptions to this?

Yes. We due to high demand from our customers, we have made exceptions for the sales@ and info@ role accounts and not included them in our blacklist. However, we still strongly recommend not to send to these addresses unless you know for sure that your content will be welcome.

If there are role addresses on our blacklist that you do need to send emails to, for example transactional messages, we can also make individual exceptions; please contact Emarsys Support.

Further reading

For more information on the definition of role accounts and their purpose, you might want to read the Internet Engineering Task Force memorandum on this subject: